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Thanks for posting this. I remain cautiously interested -- the project doesn't appear to be quite on the level of the original DX, but at least the developers seem to have learned from the IW fiasco. It is also reassuring that Dugas places emphasis on the importance of moral choices and consequences.

We will see what will be the result when the design meets the cold, hard reality of modern game publishing.

René, I hope the moral choices and consequences are more like The Witcher and less like Bioshock.

In case you don't know what I mean, in The Witcher the choices usually involved picking the lesser evil, and had a sometimes dramatic effect on the game world (usually) sometime later in the story, far enough ahead so that it's hard to just go back and pick the other choice. Some choices would make the game much more difficult later on.

In Bioshock the choices (there was really only one, though you had to make it over and over) were clearly good vs. evil, and had no impact on the game-world. The only time your choice had any bearing on "the world" was in the end-game movie, which means you never actually had to "live" with your choice.

(On the other hand, Bioshock had much more of a "choose how you play" variety than The Witcher, which was fairly locked concerning your play style.)

In Dark Messiah the player was being set up for something which I thought was going to be very clever. The "normal" path of the game was actually the evil path, and when changing to the good path, you would lose certain powers and the ability to use some extremely powerful gear. Much to my chagrin, once the good path was chosen, you were then presented with "good" weapons even more powerful than the ones you had lost (though the power was gone and not replaced.) It would have had much more meaning if you were then tremendously underpowered as a price for switching sides.

EDIT: Anyway, I am basically happy with everything in the article, apart from the emphasis on good and evil. I thought the grey morality was part of what made the DX series stand out. I wished for more details about the conversations, but it sounds like they haven't really got it nailed down yet.

Like in real life, some choices should be totally gray, with both options difficult to choose from because it's very difficult to see in the long term which will have the best results.

But there should also be things that come down to good and evil - the problem with games is that when in real life, when people really do pick the evil choice, it's out of fear, greed, lust, or any number of other things that are very difficult to simulate in a game environment. The rewards for doing evil in a game just aren't the same (real money, real sex, real self-preservation against injury or death) as they would be in real life, so it's harder to make a compelling plot-path for the player to follow. With shades of gray, where the outcome, benefits, and so forth, are hidden from the player, it's much easier to design.

What sort of things could a game offer you, as a player, to make the evil path in a game the one you would wish to choose? Right off the bat, all I can think of is Thief, where murdering guards becomes more and more of a real option after playing through the same sequence thirty times and realising how easy it would be to just draw your bow/sword and just kill everyone. However, unless there is an artificial objective forbidding it, there are no consequences for doing it. And even then, the evil path isn't what you chose, it was what you were forced into after trial and error.

I think that's more of a matter of perspective. My vocabulary doesn't too often feature the terms "good" and "evil" in that sense, aside from when I'm trying to drastically simplify things or talking about D&D. I'm not looking to discuss anyone's personal ethics here, but as far as most films and videogames go, "good" and "evil" are commonly used as simple synonyms for "altrusitic" and, respectively, "selfish". Bearing all this in mind, and with the added weight of DX3 having a cyberpunk setting, I would be rather disappointed if the devs chose to dump the concept of moral ambiguity in favor of a clear cut "good vs. evil" dichotomy.

But - where did this idea come from? Here's two direct quotes from the article (just before the Karma Chameleon section, and then within it):

Originally Posted by Dugas

We also want to touch certain things, like maybe bring some events in front of the player, where there's no good or bad answer to that, or you're not forced to do anything about that either. So it would be more about how certain players react to what they see, and if they decide to intervene or not.

Originally Posted by Dugas

I like it when a game [presents] choices in a way that is kind of honest, that the game doesn't tell you "oh, that's bad" or "oh, that's good". I like it when a game gives me the choices and then I decide for myself if it's good or not.

Hrmm, admittedly I only skimmed the article, so perhaps I missed something, but I'm sure they pretty much directly said they were moving away from the "greyer morals of the second game" (I liked how they tried to make it seem like the second game had departed from the first in this area), where the player "didn't get any hints" as to what was the right thing to do.

I can't read those mentioned articles untill I'm at home. I just hope DX3 doesn't get even near to any free "good vs evil" decisions crap. I can't hear it anymore. The first one already steered quite clear of that, so here's hoping. There's so much more interesting ideas to explore and fiddle about in terms of individuality and decisions and freewill and whatnot for gamedesign. And it all means nothing anyway if there's no strong story arch in the first place.